These two Hubble images show gravitationally lensed galaxies and their halos (pink), as well as the galaxy clusters (yellow) responsible for the lensing. Gravitational lensing often results in more than one image of a single galaxy (right), or sometimes smears that light out into a ring (left). (Credit: ESO/NASA/ESA/A. Claeyssens)
Galaxies are not just the glowing stars and gas you see through a telescope. They are swaddled in a huge ball, or “halo,” of hydrogen that stretches vas ...read more
Artist's rendering of the Black Sea big bird Pachystruthio, which researchers estimate was comparable to Madagascar's elephant birds and New Zealand's moa. (Credit: Andrey Atuchin)
Towering more than ten feet tall and weighing in at about 1,000 pounds, big bird Pachystruthio was a big deal. The animal, which weighed about as much as a male polar bear, roamed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. That's thousands of miles — and across the equator — from the better-known avian giants.
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A study detected hidden consciousness in one out of seven unresponsive brain injury patients using widely-available hospital technology. (Credit: Chairoij/Shutterstock)
There are some things that life never prepares you for — like the dreaded phone call that a loved one is in a coma, and you’re responsible for making their end-of-life decisions if they don’t wake up. These decisions are further complicated by the fact that there’s no true test for consciousness. And, u ...read more
Lightning strikes are preceded by "glows" of gamma ray radiation, scientists find. (Credit: Breno Machado/Unsplash)
Summer in the U.S. brings big thunderstorms. Towering thunderhead clouds fill the skies and energy permeates the air as positive and negative electrical charges build up between the earth and the atmosphere. Lightning bolts reset the tension with a tremendous jolt of energy.
Now researchers discover glows of gamma rays – high-energy electromagnetic radiation – ap ...read more
The clump of gas ALMA spotted, about as long as the distance between the Sun and Jupiter, may one day become a fully-fledged planet. (Credit: ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, Tsukagoshi et al.)
Stars in the early stages of their lives are surrounded by flat disks of dust and gas, spinning slowly around them. Over time, this material clumps together to form planets, or eventually gets blown away by the stellar wind. This process can take millions of years, so astronomers don’t have a way to watch it ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine